Tag: Guitars

Geeks with Guitars


Whoa! Hey!  If you stumbled on here from my other domain (geekswithguitars.com) you are probably surprised and disappointed to see a collection of old articles about many things having nothing to do with guitars.  I am sorry for that but will defend a position that the AppleTV article is sadly still relevant as there is STILL no update to the device and just an increasing number of channels where an app store should be!  Hopefully that will change with WWDC2014 on June 2.

IMG_1547-1024x1024Back to the topic of guitars!  Months ago, I bought the domain geekswithguitars.com hoping to someday build a community for all of my fellow geeks (developers, engineers, tech writers, gadget loving tech people) who also have a passion and talent for music.  With a wife in school, three kids, cat, new puppy, and a software company to help run I haven’t really had the time to build this out yet.

 

Today, I saw this nice article talking about the correlation between developers and guitar players and it reminded me again how cool it would be to have a special place for us to find each other, talk about the tech, guitars, and music we love and maybe find ways to jam at conferences, form international/long distance bands, etc.

If any of this sounds interesting, or if you have ideas for content, you want to help, you want to be featured, etc. hit me on twitter or send me a note!

— Jeremy

 

HD500 based pedal board

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year. I have been wanting to talk about the way I have set up my HD500 for a while but been too busy with other projects.  This morning I had a major issue.  It appeared that I had lost all of my patches which forced me to scramble up a quick basic brand new patch about 10 minutes before showtime.  I messed around with the board tonight to happily discover that the entire problem was in my head. I was not hitting the right button to reload the other sound banks. All this was a result of a total lack of sleep.  Last night was New Years Eve after all.  🙂  Since I had things out on the floor, I took some pictures and put this post together real quick.

 

Pictured above is the rig I ended up putting together between January and July of last year.  I am sure most of you will agree, this type of project never ends.  I am sure I’ll be filling up that remaining space at some point but am happy with the flexibility and portability I have now.  I haven’t done anything with it since the end of summer other than tweak patches to include the fx loop.IMG_0717-1024x522

Requirements

I wanted something that would work well in a variety of situations and give me a large palette of great tones to work with. I play at church and plug in straight to a PA so I wanted something fairly light and quick to set up for that purpose. When I am playing with a band, I like to have an amp too. This setup ideally should work well either with my 5150 half stack or into a Tech 21 Power Engine 60. Sadly I have not experimented enough with the 5150 to say whether I like it in that scenario but it sounds great into the PE60.  Note that I have heard very good reports of using the 4-cable method to maximize the sound of both your amp and the HD500.  

The Tour

For the tour of the board I decided it would be easier to show it in a short video rather than try to describe it so I recorded something and put it up on YouTube. I have been experimenting with some music and comedy videos out there just for fun and wanted to do something a bit more serious that might have a chance of helping someone who is thinking about effects, boards, gear, and setting things up.

Here is the link, I hope it is of some value!